• Russian billionaire to spend 100 million on "biggest ever" quest to find aliens
    43 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Helix Snake;48255780]Are you suggesting we try looking for habitable planets OUTSIDE of our galaxy? All of the money and technology currently existing on earth wouldn't allow us to do that.[/QUOTE] More of the universe exists outside the Milky Way than exists inside it. This is just one galaxy after all. So I'm not saying we shouldn't look around here, of course we should. I'm saying that we are searching an incredibly teeny tiny area relative to what's out there. So if we find nothing, it means nothing. If we find lifeforms, but unintelligent ones, it means nothing as far as intelligent alien life goes. Until we can look out there, far from our home galaxy, we can't say we searched for alien life. Saying it's the biggest search ever is an incredibly misleading way of talking about it.
[QUOTE=Helix Snake;48255780]Are you suggesting we try looking for habitable planets OUTSIDE of our galaxy? All of the money and technology currently existing on earth wouldn't allow us to do that.[/QUOTE] There are 400 [I]billion[/I] stars in the milky way. A million is nothing.
[QUOTE=archangel125;48256609]There are 400 [I]billion[/I] stars in the milky way. A million is nothing.[/QUOTE] A million is still greater than zero, though, so I'd say any effort is better than none at all.
Reminds me of Hadden from Contact: [IMG]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L-CDkN_j8jc/Tv3K3IkMLTI/AAAAAAAAPTY/VWydBhYzHEg/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-12-30-07h54m56s200.png[/IMG]
We should be careful what we wish for. We search for alien life and try to make contact under some delusional assumption they will be friendly and not Hostile, as if when we do they will be somewhat relatable to us in culture and apperance like in Star Trek or Mass Effect. They won't. I'm all for going out into space, I want us to go to space and do awesome shit like colonize planets in the solar system. But we are not remotely ready, technologically, nor culturally, to deal with first contact and wont be for a long while.
I think we face more of a threat from bacteria or some germ than from intelligent aliens. I think it's more likely we land somewhere that has some new kind of bacteria we can't even detect, and we bring it back in some way, than it is that intelligent aliens arrive at Earth. Maybe humans land on Mars and bring it back without even realizing it. Plus detecting an alien germ is one thing, killing it is another, so there's that problem. What if in quarantine here on Earth we detect something foreign but alive on the astronauts? So we use our sterilization protocols and [i]it's still alive![/i] Now what?
[QUOTE=Ta16;48257096]We should be careful what we wish for. We search for alien life and try to make contact under some delusional assumption they will be friendly and not Hostile, as if when we do they will be somewhat relatable to us in culture and apperance like in Star Trek or Mass Effect. They won't. I'm all for going out into space, I want us to go to space and do awesome shit like colonize planets in the solar system. But we are not remotely ready, technologically, nor culturally, to deal with first contact and wont be for a long while.[/QUOTE] That's is a wildly and completely unnecessarily pessimistic outlook. While I can't speak for their culture or appearance (btw no one thinks aliens are going to be like star trek or mass effect), I'm going to guess that the problem of traveling faster than light is pretty universal, and I simply can't imagine a species that is struggling/has struggled as much as we have trying to beat the universal speed limit just up and attacking us.
[QUOTE=WillerinV1.02;48257373]That's is a wildly and completely unnecessarily pessimistic outlook. While I can't speak for their culture or appearance (btw no one thinks aliens are going to be like star trek or mass effect), I'm going to guess that the problem of traveling faster than light is pretty universal, and I simply can't imagine a species that is struggling/has struggled as much as we have trying to beat the universal speed limit just up and attacking us.[/QUOTE] Problem with this is that alien life will have a completely different set of morals. Compared to us, they're amoral, meaning we really can't say for sure whether other intelligent life would be friendly or not. I'm a bit of an optimist and so I agree with you, but then again, what if there was a galactic empire of mosquito-like lifeforms who were much smaller then us yet much more intelligent? We can say that we would understand and respect their intelligence, and therefore their life, and I think most of us here would. However, I'm willing to bet 9 out of 10 people would just call it a dumb bug and squash it on sight. We are ready to know of their existence, but not ready to physically mingle with them, technological barriers aside.
Don't think he realizes the cApital involved in setting up for space exploration.
[QUOTE=Glitchman;48252522]Hopefully the USA is like NO US FIRST and builds like a giant moon telescope or something[/QUOTE] Except that he's funding a research team from UC Berkeley, so, uh. Russian money for a US team? Space Race 2.0 would be confusing if the opposing group were a Russian research team funded by a US billionaire.
i wonder what will happen if suddenly the US put ALL of its money towards NASA we'd probably have our stomachs empty but we can travel to another alien planet in literally a second so that's cool
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